Yesterday, Openpowerlifting posted some stats on the distribution of placements across all results on their database. The result was not all that surprising. 47% of all results on the database were GOLD medals, 16% SILVER, 9% BRONZE, with the remaining 23% the rest. So, 72% of all the results were podium placings. That seems outlandish, but it’s the unfortunate truth in our sport.
So, if almost half the results resulted in a GOLD medal, how important/special are GOLD medals in general? Good question. We’ll leave that for you to ponder.
Tim O’Shea and I got talking about this yesterday and we wondered how more granular segments would compare. So, he did something similar for ProRaw and I said I’d do something for my 2 big local GPC meets here in Perth – the WA State Championships and Perth Cup. Markos Markopoulos posted the ProRaw results on his FB, here are ours.
GOLD – 17.32% SILVER – 14.35% BRONZE – 12.37% 4th+ – 55.96%
44% of podium medals in our comps compared to 72% on the Openpowerlifting database. In fact, there were more relative GOLD medals on their database than all of our podium winners.
As you can see from the pie chart, it’s a pretty good distribution.
What does this mean? Well we all interpret this differently but from my standpoint it means we’re on the right track here at GPC to provide the best competition available. Less podium winners means there’s more competition in each weight class. Lifters are competing for their medals and in doing so they have more value.
Let us consider the mens 90kg weight class at last weekends Perth Cup. 5 of the men went 700kg plus, so 2 men totalling 707.5kg and 700kg didn’t stand on the podium, that’s incredible competition. Another 2 totalled 690kg and out of the 11 lifters in the 90kg class, 10 of them went 600kg+.
Check out the scoresheet from Perth Cup yourself at http://ptcperth.com.au/scoresheet/53.php
If you are interested in competing in GPC events locally here in WA you can keep tabs on our events list here on FB at https://www.facebook.com/PTCPerth/events/
